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Comment by MoreMoore | Hacker News Reader

Why, just why won't any of the competitors make one of these handhelds with at least the same amount and types of input options as the Steam Deck. I'd love a higher performance handheld but none of them have two trackpads, gyro input and four back buttons, so I'm stuck with the Deck.

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It's an extra cost that doesn't add much to the device for north of 90% of their intended audience. I love my Steam Deck but barely use the trackpads except for the rare times I need the keyboard or I wind up in the desktop doing something.

The Go S appears to only have one rear button on each side.

I've played half a dozen games on the original Go, and I don't think I've used more than one rear button. In Half Life, it's more comfortable to hold for crouch. In one of the Spider Man games, it expected a trackpad click, which was easier to perform with a rear button.

Since games have been designed to be playable with only the face buttons, there's not always obvious utility for extras. Maybe as premium controllers become more popular, this will change. For now, I can definitely see the argument that 4 buttons are superfluous (except for standardization).

Just because everything is bound to the face buttons doesn't make it the best solution. Developers make do with what they have. Extra buttons mean I don't have to move my finger off the trackpad or joystick every time I want to do a common action, particularly while aiming the mouse cursor.

I do enjoy the back buttons even on games that were originally XBox controller games, those are relatively cheap compared to the trackpads.

Back buttons have turned me from an inattentive nincompoop at Dark Souls to a true Souls head.

I have a Deck and almost never use the track pads, they feel totally redundant to me. The right one is pretty good on desktop mode and in games that aren't Deck-optimized and need a mouse, though. What are you using both of them for?

I pretty much use them constantly. They're useful for playing any shooters or anything with mouse look, they're great for RTS, city builders, point and click adventure, Factorio, etc. Currently I'm playing Dawn of War, Ground Control, 688i Hunter Killer and Fleet Command, which basically requires trackpads. I also play Stronghold Crusader, Warhammer Gladius, Company of Heroes, Warframe, WoW and other MMOs on it. I honestly don't know how people get by without them, they're extremely useful.

Even for emulators, they're great for binding all kinds of extra functions.

Using the right trackpad also means I can free up the right joystick for other stuff, and there's always enough other stuff I want to access regularly enough.

I use them to play Stellaris/Rimworld/Oxygen Not Included. Rimworld/ONI you could do with Joysticks but I'm just quicker with trackpads and it's finer tuned control.

The right trackpad is absolutely a killer feature.

Rollercoaster Tycoon, FTL, point and click games are games the trackpad has vastly improved for me.

i use the right one as a mouse and the left one as a scroll wheel

> I have a Deck and almost never use the track pads,

This reads like "I never play mouse driven games"

XInput is still the standard API for controllers on PC, and there's no way for it to support additional inputs. So this is the same issue with adding gryo and extra buttons to any controller: they don't work without software to translate the new inputs to those standard either XInput or keyboard and mouse events.

Like how ds4windows is used to translate Playstation controllers gryo and touchpad. Even the Steam controller requires Steam. I don't think oems are investing in the software to do the same.

Steam already has Steam Input, a translation layer that converts between various input events to whatever the game expects.

It is how i got to play the original System Shock 2 on my Steam Deck even though the game was designed with a keyboard and mouse in place.

Yeah, but that requires Steam to add support for those input events. It doesn't have an API for you to feed it input events. There's not exactly a standard for random input events for Steam to hook into either.

That's why distros like Bazzite and ChimeraOS have an additional translator[0] to take input events and output a controller that Steam supports, Dualsense edge or Steam Deck's controller, to be able to add support for gyro and back buttons.

[0] https://github.com/hhd-dev/hhd or https://github.com/ShadowBlip/InputPlumber

This runs SteamOS. That ships with the necessary controller translation layer you're describing.

It's TBD how it will handle extra buttons. I believe Valve has a kernel module for the Steam Deck controller.

Lenovo's current handheld exposes an Xbox controller and a USB device with extra buttons. Handheld Daemon synthesizes them into a virtual PlayStaton controller. If you tried to use the current SteamOS without Handheld Daemon, the 6 extra buttons wouldn't work. The community is waiting to see if Valve ships a more robust solution that Linux can standardize on, or if we'll still be using daemons like HHD for devices that don't have official Valve support.

This, the Lenovo Legion Go S—Powered by SteamOS, shares the hardware as the Windows variant, Lenovo Legion Go S. They're not building hardware specific for SteamOS yet.

I think the Orange Pi Neo is the only (other) one that's targeting Linux only. And they do have touchpads

On PC, or on Windows ?

This is something to watch : we'll see how much Valve actually cares about Linux (and libre software/hardware in general) compared to just using it to get rid of Windows : will they make their new controller API SteamOS exclusive ?

(How well do Steam Link and Steam Controller work without Steam ?)

I'd say on PC because it's easier to name the modern controller protocols that aren't Xinput: Nintendo, Sony, and Steam. Except for Steam, the first two aren't targeting PCs. Basically every other controller targeting PC from the old Logitech F710 to the Flydigi Apex 4 will be using XInput to communicate with the computer. Even the Hori Steam Controller has an alternative XInput mode despite being the only current standalone Steam Controller.

Steam Link the streaming application does require the Steam. Steam Link the discontinued hardware was able to run local applications without Steam.

The Steam Controller defaults to a keyboard and mouse mode until it receives a signal from Steam. So even on Linux, the Steam controller required Steam to function as a controller until the protocol was reverse engineered. Can read about it in the driver comment header, and the Valve copyright that didn't get added until they contributed support for the Deck controller in these drivers : https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/hid/hi...

Thanks for the information.

(I recently started again regularly using both the hardware Steam Link and the original Steam Controller - funnily enough, for a non-Steam game - I'll have to check out what people have hacked over the years...)

They didn't made proton exclusive why would they do it with input

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